You're the second person so far to link this meme to conservatism, which didn't occur to me at all when I dropped the quote into the queue. Interesting. It may be a partial explanation for why I don't notice the effect.
I've only heard this meme from conservatism (I know that Christopher Hitchens calls himself a "sensible liberal" these days, but that's indistinguishable from conservatism at both theoretical and practical levels.)
Where it's directly linked to (social) conservatism is that it limits the role of women. Socially liberal men are not supposed to be threatened by powerful women (though they often are, of course). Social conservatives are only not threatened by powerful women if they can turn it into a kink (see Ann Coulter) or separate the woman—by which they mean sex, because for the social conservative, women are inseparable from their status as sex objects or walking incubators—from the power (see Maggie Thatcher).
Humour is threatening because it implies both intellect and a certain sort of power.* The only way a social conservative who wants to keep women powerless can deal with a funny woman is by separating her from her function as a sexual object.
* Howard Barker disagreed, rather convincingly, but I still think it's true.
Huh. And ouch. That makes a certain, rather sick, kind of sense. It makes more sense to me than the link to intelligence, because you don't need to be smart to like people who make you laugh.
So for a conservative, wit has to be defeminizing (and therefore unsexy) because no "real woman" in their eyes would go there? With regard to the people holding that sort of conservative and anti-women mindset, I'm not sure which this increases more: my fear of them or my pity for them.
Christopher Hitchens flat-out declared that "women aren't funny." I'd be inclined to agree if he'd said that women aren't a joke, but I'm not sure that'd ever have occurred to him. (Also, in the Vanity Fair article where he first advanced the proposition, he refers to women as "more deadly" than men. Yeah. No stereotyping there.*)
And yes, I'd say that retrograde gender stereotypes are more highly correlated with conservatism than centrism or liberalism, although frankly, I'm none too impressed with some ostensible liberals these days either.
My personal take on why women aren't supposed to be funny is that for a woman to be funny in that particular paradigm, she'd have to be talking about things that the men in question would want to listen to, and in that paradigm, women are trivial and not worth listening to by default.
Also, most right-wingers seem to miss the fact that humour is generally better when the power imbalance is skewed away from the joke-teller (that is, powerless groups can tell jokes about powerful groups and it's funny, but not the other way around), because they generally like an approximation of humour that reinforces the modes of oppression of the status quo.
___________ * That's doubtless why most serial killers are male.
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Where it's directly linked to (social) conservatism is that it limits the role of women. Socially liberal men are not supposed to be threatened by powerful women (though they often are, of course). Social conservatives are only not threatened by powerful women if they can turn it into a kink (see Ann Coulter) or separate the woman—by which they mean sex, because for the social conservative, women are inseparable from their status as sex objects or walking incubators—from the power (see Maggie Thatcher).
Humour is threatening because it implies both intellect and a certain sort of power.* The only way a social conservative who wants to keep women powerless can deal with a funny woman is by separating her from her function as a sexual object.
* Howard Barker disagreed, rather convincingly, but I still think it's true.
(no subject)
So for a conservative, wit has to be defeminizing (and therefore unsexy) because no "real woman" in their eyes would go there? With regard to the people holding that sort of conservative and anti-women mindset, I'm not sure which this increases more: my fear of them or my pity for them.
(no subject)
And yes, I'd say that retrograde gender stereotypes are more highly correlated with conservatism than centrism or liberalism, although frankly, I'm none too impressed with some ostensible liberals these days either.
My personal take on why women aren't supposed to be funny is that for a woman to be funny in that particular paradigm, she'd have to be talking about things that the men in question would want to listen to, and in that paradigm, women are trivial and not worth listening to by default.
Also, most right-wingers seem to miss the fact that humour is generally better when the power imbalance is skewed away from the joke-teller (that is, powerless groups can tell jokes about powerful groups and it's funny, but not the other way around), because they generally like an approximation of humour that reinforces the modes of oppression of the status quo.
___________
* That's doubtless why most serial killers are male.